Building on last weeks post about the energy neutral bio acoustic monitors we are developing, this week has been testing assemblies. We now have 4 units out in the Garden Lab testing and focusing on how to deploy these. The gif above shows one night of bat activity from one of the units in a north London allotment.

At the start of the week we were working out assembly requirements and ordering the little connectors and cables you forget about. One of our MSc students called into the lab to take some pictures of their dissertation project (deadline for submission was Thursday!) and asked if this was a PhD project, I said no this is our summer dissertation project!

Version one of a deployable prototype is now pinned down and assembly boards designed to fit the devices in the enclosure. The battery we ended up using was slightly wider than anticipated so extra enclosure boxes had to be ordered, but turns out the specs online were generous and the battery does fit the original box we hoped to use.

Simon has been having some fun working out how to mount the various components when we are not quite sure what and how we can make these “cow proof”, there will probably be lots of learning on the first few installs.

We now have a couple of devices in the GardenLab - one on cellular, one on Lora - and have managed to get the Multitech Lora GW also on cellular and battery powered. Need to do some analysis to see how sustainable that is through the winter but for current testing seems to be working fine.

The allotment is still looking green despite no rain for 8 weeks. Courgettes still going, the outside tomatoes seem to be doing much better this year than the greenhouse ones and the peppers are turning a lovely shade of red. Time to start harvesting.

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:

• looks like I didn’t see anything worth tagging this week, which is a shame, must be really heads down on project work.